Where does Modelio come from?

A few words on the origins of Modelio.

Put simply, Modelio is the result of 20 years of marketplace history, practical experience and technical knowledge of the needs and requirements of software and business modeling. And we're proud of this history.

The story starts in 1991, with the launch by Softeam of the Objecteering modeling tool (www.objecteering.com), supporting the Class Relation object-oriented method, as well as model-driven code generation for C++ and document generation. The father of Class Relation, Philippe Desfray, was also the creator of Objecteering. Class Relation was already a very mature modeling language and method, providing support of class modeling, state machine modeling, class structuring mechanisms (schemas and domains) and extension mechanisms (very similar to UML profiles). It was both graphical and syntactical, and Objecteering supported both representations in synch.

The years passed and the innovations continued. In 1994, version 3 of Objecteering opened up its metamodel, with support of a metamodel handling and transformation language called H, which later evolved into the J language. In 1998, Objecteering made the decision to simultaneously support both Class Relation and UML in its version 4, and in 2000, a new UML Profile Builder tool was added to the Objecteering range, providing the first ever support of UML profiles. In the years that followed, Objecteering continued to evolve, providing support of very large models and large team cooperation, and arriving at its UML2-compliant version 6 in 2006. Today, there is still a large community of users who use Objecteering in their critical system development projects.

In 2009, the tool was completely overhauled and Modelio was born. Although similar in many respects, Modelio and Objecteering were fundamentally different. Unlike its big brother, Modelio was built on the Eclipse RCP framework, with greatly enhanced ergonomics. And instead of being developed in C++ like Objecteering, most of Modelio's code is in Java. Objecteering's model transformation language (H then J) was abandoned in favor of Java, with the distribution of a public API matching Modelio's metamodel.

In 2011, and after 20 years of continuous improvement and innovation, the decision was taken to move Modelio to open source licensing scheme. Modelio's core is fully open sourced, as are a number of important Modelio modules, and a growing community of users and developers is getting involved in the development of this open source environment.

The Modelio community works alongside Modeliosoft, distributor of commercial Modelio solutions. This collaboration combines freedom and security, guaranteeing a high level of quality and ensuring that Modelio remains a platform for innovation.